Sam Broner

Well, stablecoin expert was short lived. We're building @bettermoney_co and it's been a long time coming. We're hiring across the board - especially engineers with payments, ledgering, and distributed systems experience. DM me if you want to build better money.

What happens when every bank, fintech, and enterprise launches its own stablecoin? In this episode of the WRAP UP Podcast, I sit down with @SamBroner, the CEO of @bettermoney_co, a former investor at @a16z, and a former engineer at Microsoft, to discuss why he left venture capital to build a stablecoin company. Sam is building what he calls a stablecoin clearinghouse infrastructure that allows banks, fintechs, and payment companies to swap between stablecoins at guaranteed 1:1 pricing, without relying on thin market liquidity or costly trading venues. We discuss: Why stablecoin infrastructure has been built primarily for trading, not payments How a stablecoin clearinghouse works Why large companies are launching custom branded stablecoins The economics behind stablecoin issuance Stablecoins vs CBDCs Why stablecoins may become the default payment rail for AI agents What Sam learned moving from investor to founder One of the most important takeaways from this conversation is that the future of money may look less like a handful of dominant stablecoins and more like thousands of interoperable digital dollars issued by banks, fintechs, and enterprises. Better Money Company is building the infrastructure to make that possible.

@pglyman @bettermoney_co @AdamZuck13 I had a suspicion we'd agree on this!

@bettermoney_co @AdamZuck13 I like this “Stablecoins will change the world because they are the best technology for moving money: fast, cheap, global, programmable, and available around the clock.”

Stablecoins don't compete with bank deposits. They compete with payment rails. @AdamZuck13 on why the CLARITY Act compromise accelerates the natural advantages of stablecoins.

@LucaProsperi It's a skill! But also I was just the young guy next to Steve Lucco, who he definitely knew.

@SamBroner Beware, that those very senior folks are very well trained to be convincing in pretending they remember you. I fell in the trap multiple times, and every time it feels as goo as the first. lol

I believe my first time telling the story of when I pitched Bill Gates and then Satya on the Fluid Framework in product reviews. Still probably the coolest algorithmic and systems work I've done. Bill called what we were working on "the dumbest fucking thing he'd ever heard". I sat just to his left and proudly watched as he wrote my name down at the top of a yellow legal pad. Ultimately he supported our work. Satya was much more forgiving. I must have looked like hell when we first met, although it seemed he remembered me in subsequent meetings. 36 hour sprint to a working demo, but I had sit cross legged, sweaty below a glass podium (why glass??) so I could modify a couple of configs live during the demo to get the thing working. I remember him asking me if it was a good idea to demo the thing, and I think I said, "Yeah, it's pretty cool" Anyway, great to join @dr3wrogers and the @stabledash team to do the deep dive on @bettermoney_co. I'm doing stablecoin payments now, but the problems of sync, consensus, and correctness remain core to the solution. As well as a love of things that make a big impact through small improvements to every day experiences. Listen in below!

@stabledash @a16zcrypto Great pod. Thanks for having me on. x.com/SamBroner/stat…

.@SamBroner spent years at @a16zcrypto studying hundreds of stablecoin-focused startups. Mature fintechs, banks weighing their stablecoin strategy, early teams pitching infrastructure plays. The one pattern that kept surfacing: stablecoins were built for trading, not payments. Before a16z, Broner was an engineer at @Microsoft, where he built the Fluid Framework that helped re-platform Word from desktop to browser. He demoed for Bill Gates two weeks into the project. Spent time at the Boston Fed's stablecoin initiative during MIT Sloan, angel invested in Cursor before most people had heard of it, and kept circling back to the same problem: moving from one stablecoin to another still works like a trade, not a payment. That's when he founded @bettermoney_co - a stablecoin clearinghouse. Any stablecoin in, any stablecoin out, at a fixed price, with a guaranteed time of delivery. Its member issuers include @Stablecoin, @paxoslabs, @withAUSD, @m0, @moonpay, @brale_xyz, and @fraxfinance. Clients include @tryramp, @privy, @turnkeyhq, and @ModernTreasury. The Better Money Company raised $10 million from @a16zcrypto, @BoxGroup, and @seedtosunflower, and came out of stealth last week. Broner's point is simple. You don't sell Wells Fargo dollars at a variable price to get Bank of America dollars. Stablecoins shouldn't work that way either. @SamBroner sat down with @dr3wrogers in Brooklyn. 00:00 - "I was living in Beijing in 2017" 02:24 - Paperwork in payments, and why engineers find it ridiculous 06:49 - MIT Sloan, the Boston Fed, and the stablecoin research scene 09:07 - The Fluid Framework: coding under a podium while Satya watched 13:10 - Why making payments a little bit better matters at massive scale 15:08 - Stablecoins are optimized for trading pairs, not payment flows 17:20 - What a clearinghouse is: from London taverns to hub-and-spoke 21:46 - Guaranteed pricing, guaranteed settlement, compliant clearing 25:41 - "Better money needs to be one to one" 31:52 - Instant payouts for gig workers: a weekend build on stablecoin rails 33:49 - Tourists in the Bazaar: how agents will transact 39:58 - Atomic payments and why faster settlement changes everything 44:01 - Why enterprise agent payments dwarf consumer agent payments 47:38 - Selling shovels vs. going for gold 53:24 - What's next for The Better Money Company Episode 0048, Presented by @altitude

New fav micro-AI optimization... ask Claude to color code your schedule for you by meeting category.

@dccockfoster Caffeine in general needs standards.

Buying a cold brew from a random coffee shop in NYC is a total gamble You either end up wired out of your mind and extremely jittery Or worse, you get something that looks, tastes and feels closer to water then coffee We need a NYC cold brew standards coalition

@GSkrovina Better money!

@SamBroner STABLECOINS!!!!

Just wrapped Consensus and basically all I heard was stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins from banks, payment cos, fintechs & enterprises all trying to use stablecoins (better money!) to make their products better, biz more profitable & ops simpler. Plus so many great people!

@John_PiazzaIV @samrags_ I’m proudly pro bodega coffee.

@SamBroner @samrags_ I’d like to know where you are finding $2 coffee sir

Has anyone met a merchant paying 12bps in fees?

@samrags_ Visa's taking 14bps though. Probably worth calling out that Visa's take is low, but the bundled product is expensive and unneccessary.

@SamBroner Oh no that looks like more than 12 bps

@Nic_Wenzel_1 @samrags_ sambroner.com/posts/2024-12-…

@SamBroner @samrags_ This visual is fantastic, where is it from?

@awerner @consensus2026 One of those great people!

@SamBroner @consensus2026 😎

@BirdnalsLAW Appreciate it!

@SamBroner Didn’t get a chance to stay long after to say hi, but yours was one of the better presentations I was able to catch. Great hook with the Five Bells Tavern. Excited to watch what y’all are building!

@krrishd Big checks guy

tired of this cards vs stablecoin debate. it’s going to be paper checks

@duborges Two providers for every route should be table stakes.

two months bootstrapping a neobank fintech: 1) i think our main lesson last month was: don’t rely on a single partner for money orchestration on sales call, they have everything you need, but when time comes, sooo many issues present - some partners have great fees, but very poor api/docs (basically non-implementable, gotta do everything manually) - some have great API, but extremely rigorous compliance (you integrate the whole thing, to only then find out they wont approve your clients) - some have great support, but wont cover all rails your clients need (pix only, no ACH, no swift, no named accounts, no microdeposits, etc) - some have everything you need, but charge a high monthly minimum with 2x fees you got from the other provider - not to mention the perfect partners, but with abusive contracts that makes our lawyer Claude go crazy we spoke with ~15 orchestration partners for USD, BRL, EUR, AED, CHF and CNY, and realized there’s no “one size fits all” unfortunately so we are basically analyzing what each client needs and activating partner XYZ for them - it’s working fine, besides the tech complexity (though i have already fully integrated 8 partners and it's now taking me 1-2 days to get the whole thing up and running, while larger teams would take weeks - that's the power of repetition) 2) we initially decided on using Base USDC for our backend (even though our clients don’t really see anything stablecoin-related on the dashboard, as a product strategy) but some banking partners wouldnt work on that chain, and Solana seemed to have better coverage and speed so we had to build our own bridging process using circle’s CCTP (to make sure no % fees incurred, eating the low fees we charge) - this was pretty cool but very hard to make it work so now we became not only multi-partners but also multi-chains (no USDT support though, that additional 0.1% was a no-go for us) 3) one of our clients (who turns out to be an old friend), brought his while whole Payroll to Dolafy i built a special dashboard area so they could add all employees/collaborators, enter their banking details, salary and pay date then in a single click every month, they would pay that employee anywhere in the world (via ACH, WIRE, PIX or SEPA), using their Dolafy balance had to work for 20 hours the day it went live, but worked really well and their finance team loved it (much more organized and simple than the bulk-payment via CSV they were doing at Husky) the Payroll product itself is not so profitable in comparison to other clients moving millions in one txn, but it was really satisfying to be able to see all these people getting paid by Dolafy 4) the Credit Cards implementation has been my biggest frustration - i even had nightmares with it and woke up many days in terrible mood even though i implemented their whole API in 2 days, it’s been over a month already and their compliance and legal teams keep slowing us down things like: “hey, you cant mention the term unlimited cards, must be multiple cards” and then i fix it in 5 minutes, and they submit for approval that takes 7 days again and then they come back with “you actually cant talk about cards at all on the homepage, must create a separate page for that” “unlimited back and forth” seems a reasonable term to describe them though in the end, the partner changed the whole copy of our site and we still couldnt get the approval after 40 days ughh tbh, im not sure they are that slow because of bad management or because they try to push the onboarding longer to monetize the setup fees (even though they are losing revenue during this period) anyway, i hope we have cards live in the coming days which will be huge to get more clients and make the current ones move more money with Dolafy (unfortunately there are not many BIN Sponsors for Corporate Cards that we could use besides them) 5) my partner is thinking about moving with his wife to Floripa so we can set up a Dolafy office here the magic island is now the center of crypto and fintech companies in Brazil, plus many of our clients are living here (quality of life and safety for the rich) them startup offices are mainly in the SC/Jurere area (which is opposite side from where I live on the island) but it’s cool to be a short drive away to people with high synergy instead of a long flight so yeah, that’s it for now. talk to you again on our 3rd month building a fintech, hopefully after processing millions in Meta / Google Ads txns (that's what our clients need cards for) thanks for following

At Consensus? Hit me up. I’m on stage tomorrow at 10:45, spotlight stage to tell you why stablecoins are better money and how you can use them! And if you want to work at @bettermoney_co, hit my DMs or come find me

@grant__gregory @united On the one hand, I want to be grateful we have space internet in the sky. On the other hand, expectations have been set and I'd like them to be met.

Another cross country flight where @united doesn’t have WiFi Has to be my 4th or 5th flight this year where that’s the case. Total disaster